Juan de Páez died at sixty-nine years old, on December 15th, 1675. Upon direct request and with the Guadalajara Ecclesiastical Town Council’s approval, he was buried at the foot of the Altar of the Holy Christ (Santo Cristo) that stood on the left lateral nave, between the temple’s fifth and sixth columns. He was survived by his wife Margarita and four daughters: María, Juana, Francisca and Margarita. 

Significantly and interestingly, in his last will and testament, Juan de Páez declared his Japanese origin and pointed out that he was from Osaka. A wealthy man, he left six thousand pesos (silver coins) to be invested in “certain secure properties” with the objective of founding a chaplaincy. In addition, he left another one thousand pesos to be invested in “secure properties,” with their income designated for the expenses of wax, wine and vestments of the Altar of the Santo Cristo. [Image of Juan and Margarita’s burials in the Cathedral?]

Páez made his will before Public Notary Don Thomás de Orendain, and appointed as executors his wife and several fellow Church members: Licenciado Don Simón Conejero Ruiz, a Cathedral prebendary, and Licenciado Francisco de Quijada, presbyter clergyman and secretary of the Ecclesiastic Town Council, accountant of the tithe incomes and Juan de Páez’s successor as steward.  Finally, he designated his wife and Francisco de Quijada as keeper of his assets or “what resulted from their sale.” 

Margarita outlived her husband and became the family’s matriarch, as revealed by the parishioners’ register drawn by the Cathedral parish in 1679. According to the records, Margarita de Encío’s extended family was made up of twenty-five people, including family members, slaves and servants, most of whom were women. Among the family members mentioned in the register, there were two daughters: Juana and Margarita, as well as daughter Francisca’s widower, Milián de Galarza and her granddaughter Rosa Sánchez. There were seventeen slaves at the service of the Páez Encío household: five black women, eleven mulatto women and Juan de Dios, whose racial origin was not noted. An Indian woman, María, completed the service staff. Juan de Páez managed to have a large sum invested in slaves; in the records consulted we found a total of twenty-seven slaves attributed to the Japanese.[41] In Guadalajara black and mulatto slave women outnumbered male slaves; most of them were involved in domestic work at the service of the Tapatía elite. 

Margarita de Encío died a year after this parochial register was completed; she was buried alongside her husband in the Cathedral. Her daughter Juana then took over the reins of the clan for almost three more decades. Juana died in 1704, having appointed her brother-in-law Milian de Galarza executor of her estate; she favored the Sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad with one of the houses she owned located on San Agustín Street. She was outlived by four children and seven nephews and nieces. What became of them? That is stuff for another research.

____________________

^{[41] Thomas Calvo reports that in seventeenth-century Guadalajara, it is after 1630 when slaves from Africa started being introduced in an important way by means of local traders in turn connected with Portuguese traders from Mexico City, most of the slaves came from Angola. CALVO, Thomas; Guadalajara y su región…, p. 146.}